danieldwilliam (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
danieldwilliam) wrote2014-10-03 02:17 pm
danieldwilliam) wrote2014-10-03 02:17 pm
Entry tags:
On Harpooning the Whale - The Long Slow Death of the Scottish Labour Party
In the wake of #IndyRef I’ve seen many suggestions that Scottish Labour are dead and that the SNP will win a majority of seats of Westminster seats in the 2015 General Election.
I don’t think the end has come for Scottish Labour. I think Scottish Labour is in long term decline with an existential threat. Nothing that is acceptable to them will repair their situation. The end is nigh-ish.
What is the problem?
Scottish Labour haven’t won an election a Holyrood election since 2003. That’s ten years and counting. Since 1999 MSP’s returned to Holyrood have fallen from 56 to 37. Over the same period the number of local councillors returned for Labour has fallen from 550 to 394. In contrast the SNP have increased councillors from 204 to 425 and MSP’s from 35 to 69, including a supposedly impossible absolute majority at Holyrood.
Things are a little more static in the European elections. At the moment Labour are down a little, the SNP up a little. The big change is that in 1999 the Labour Party had 3 MSP’s returned on 28.7% of the vote. They currently have two on 25.9%.
This long slow decline in the Labour party vote is built on a number of factors.
The first and most important is that the Scottish Labour Party is not focusing its efforts on Holyrood. As an organisation its main focus appears to be on winning UK general elections. Fine, perhaps even right, but with much of the day to day government of Scotland happening at Holyrood this give Scottish Labour a problem. What is it’s Scottish offering? What is it for?
The second, linked problem, is that this diffused Scottish offering is being made by the Scottish Labour ‘B’ team. Most of the Labour Party’s talent in Scotland is pointed at Westminster. There is a local minima problem here. After You. It’s easy to say that the solution is for some of the current Labour senior figures to relocate to Holyrood and for some of the Bright Young Things to do the same. After You. Unless many of them go, it will not work for any of them. Whilst those that go are having a difficult dust up with Sturgeon and Swinney and co those that stay are lining up UK Cabinet posts or dreaming of occupying Ten Downing Street. Bute House is nice but it’s not Downing Street, so After You.
Thirdly, it appears that the ability of Scottish Labour to offer a Scottish offer is restricted by Labour in London so that there aren’t mixed messages or scenes of disloyalty.
Fourth the combination of 1-3 above makes the Scottish Labour election campaign really, really, really poor.
Finally, the SNP and Greens and SSP gain from the anti-establishment mood of the UK and the use of PR in Scotland allows them to translate in to seats at elections, mainly at the expense of the Labour Party.
Current opinion polls for Holyrood see the SNP remaining in government, some with as a minority government with support from the Greens, some with an increased majority. An increased majority from an absolute majority in a system designed specifically not to allow the SNP to win an absolute majority.
And the more this goes on the less likely anyone Scottish from London is likely to sacrifice themselves to go to Holyrood to sort it out. The longer this goes on the more likely it is that the next generation of Scottish political activists find their natural home in the SNP.
Added to this are the truly staggering increases in SNP (and Green and SSP) membership. SNP membership has increased by over 40,000 to over 70,000 members making them the third largest UK political party on only 8% of the UK population. Approximately 1 in every 60 Scottish voters is a member of the SNP. They have more members than the Communist Party of China. (1) The Labour Party might have 10,000 members in Scotland.
So, the SNP are going to win 40 Westminster seats in 2015.
Well no.
As John Curtis points out things are not quite as dire as at the moment as the hullaballoo would have you believe. The Labour Westminster vote is perhaps down a little, perhaps a little softer than it was but it’s still there and still functionally the same as it was in 2010.
True many Labour voters voted for independence. I think those that did voted for independence in the hope that it would short circuit their side having to win the 2015 and 2020 general elections. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they see independence as a permanent panacea. What is the next decision then need to make. The 2015 general election will probably be framed as a fight between Labour and Conservatives over who can manage the deficit least badly.
http://blog.whatscotlandthinks.org/2014/10/labour-worried/
The 70,000 SNP members might make a bit of a difference but the ability of a ground campaign to overturn the effects of the strategic situation of an election and the air campaign are limited.
There is also what I call the First Past the Post inflection point or the Only A Bar Chart Can Win Here principle. First Past the Post elections are about getting more votes for your broad coalition than the other broad coalition gets and concentrating them behind one candidate. A large factor in this is trying to narrow down your choices to who you think is okay who can win and who you hate who might win. At the moment it looks like most people who would vote centre-left will still think the only people who can win the seat they live in over the Tories are Labour. This is backed up by a few remarks from Curtis. There are no seats where the SNP are within 10% of the Labour vote. There not many where they are within 20%. There are not many seats where an easily achievable switch from Labour to SNP puts the SNP through.
Whilst a lot of one-time Labour voters voted Yes, perhaps more than a third about one in five SNP voters voted No. Voters in Scotland already happily split their vote between Labour at Westminster and the SNP at Holyrood. If you can ask what is the point of the Labour Party at Holyrood you can equally ask what the point of the SNP at Westminster is.
This isn’t to say that the No vote wasn’t bad news for Scottish Labour. It was. They badly ran a negative campaign. There is a video of their current leader basically agreeing that Scotland is too poor, too wee and too stupid to thrive as an independent country. They’ve irritated lots of voters. Alienated many of their activists. Demonstrated once again that they are basically the Glasgow wing of the Islington Labour Party. They’ve lost members to the SNP. They go in to the 2015 General Election in poor shape against an opposition that has been energised and enthused and angered by losing the referendum. With a close General Election result and constitutional issues in play the SNP will fancy holding the balance of power and have everything to play for.
What does winning mean? For the Labour Party is means getting more seats than the Tories at Westminster. For the SNP it means taking a few seats off Labour.
(With Salmond stepping down as First Minister, the SNP now have a spare heavy weight figure of their own to deploy against a vulnerable inner-city Labour seat. Just a thought.)
But I don’t think the General Election in 2015 will be a harpoon through the heart for the once mighty whale of Scottish Labour.
My main assumption is that we don’t see significant constitutional reform or electoral reform in the UK over the next 5 years i.e. that the Vow is trashed and that Labour and the Tories can’t work a suitable constitutional settlement in England that leaves both of them, but only them, in with a chance of running the government.
What I think is more likely to happen is this.
If the SNP are lucky rumours that Johann Lamont is about to be booted in favour of Jim Murphy will prove true. Imagine trying to run for First Minister of Scotland when you are not even the leader of Scottish Labour.
The SNP do well in Scotland in 2015. They pick up a few seats, maybe a dozen. If they end up holding the balance of power at Westminster then they get marginally more favourable funding and a marginally more favourable constitutional settlement from Westminster until the Tories scupper the whole thing by insisting on English Votes for English Laws which the London Labour Party will reject. A good result for the SNP would be to get within 10% in a lot of seats ready for the bar charts in 2020.
In 2016 the SNP win a third term under fresh leadership. In particular they will be chipping away at Labour’s constituency vote in Glasgow and Dundee. By then the Solemn Vow will have been exposed for the unworkable and undeliverable fantasy that it is and many of those who voted Labour and No to get Devo Max will have seen that their referendum vote was hornswoggled out of them. The SNP’s 2016 election campaign of only a vote for the SNP can guarantee Home Rule and that’s the only way to stop Labour and the Tories cutting our budgets.
Following the 2016 Holyrood election comes the real death knell for Scottish Labour the next round of local elections. Here’s where the SNP’s new Grand Army comes in to play with a hugely more effective Get Out The Vote campaign leading to many Labour councillors losing their seats. Electoral Reform Society research shows a strong link between local councillors in an area and wining and holding Westminster seats. With their local councillor diminished the Labour party infrastructure is now under significant pressure.
Come the 2020 UK general election the combination of the SNP having created lots more marginal seats in 2015 and having a massively better Scottish infrastructure and the loss of incumbency factors as Labour MP’s retire puts the SNP in with a chance of winning the 2020 General Election.
And that’s when Nicola Sturgeon stands a chance of harpooning the whale.
(1) Not quite, the Communist Party of China has 86.7m members out of a population of 1,351m, about one in every 16 of the population.
I don’t think the end has come for Scottish Labour. I think Scottish Labour is in long term decline with an existential threat. Nothing that is acceptable to them will repair their situation. The end is nigh-ish.
What is the problem?
Scottish Labour haven’t won an election a Holyrood election since 2003. That’s ten years and counting. Since 1999 MSP’s returned to Holyrood have fallen from 56 to 37. Over the same period the number of local councillors returned for Labour has fallen from 550 to 394. In contrast the SNP have increased councillors from 204 to 425 and MSP’s from 35 to 69, including a supposedly impossible absolute majority at Holyrood.
Things are a little more static in the European elections. At the moment Labour are down a little, the SNP up a little. The big change is that in 1999 the Labour Party had 3 MSP’s returned on 28.7% of the vote. They currently have two on 25.9%.
This long slow decline in the Labour party vote is built on a number of factors.
The first and most important is that the Scottish Labour Party is not focusing its efforts on Holyrood. As an organisation its main focus appears to be on winning UK general elections. Fine, perhaps even right, but with much of the day to day government of Scotland happening at Holyrood this give Scottish Labour a problem. What is it’s Scottish offering? What is it for?
The second, linked problem, is that this diffused Scottish offering is being made by the Scottish Labour ‘B’ team. Most of the Labour Party’s talent in Scotland is pointed at Westminster. There is a local minima problem here. After You. It’s easy to say that the solution is for some of the current Labour senior figures to relocate to Holyrood and for some of the Bright Young Things to do the same. After You. Unless many of them go, it will not work for any of them. Whilst those that go are having a difficult dust up with Sturgeon and Swinney and co those that stay are lining up UK Cabinet posts or dreaming of occupying Ten Downing Street. Bute House is nice but it’s not Downing Street, so After You.
Thirdly, it appears that the ability of Scottish Labour to offer a Scottish offer is restricted by Labour in London so that there aren’t mixed messages or scenes of disloyalty.
Fourth the combination of 1-3 above makes the Scottish Labour election campaign really, really, really poor.
Finally, the SNP and Greens and SSP gain from the anti-establishment mood of the UK and the use of PR in Scotland allows them to translate in to seats at elections, mainly at the expense of the Labour Party.
Current opinion polls for Holyrood see the SNP remaining in government, some with as a minority government with support from the Greens, some with an increased majority. An increased majority from an absolute majority in a system designed specifically not to allow the SNP to win an absolute majority.
And the more this goes on the less likely anyone Scottish from London is likely to sacrifice themselves to go to Holyrood to sort it out. The longer this goes on the more likely it is that the next generation of Scottish political activists find their natural home in the SNP.
Added to this are the truly staggering increases in SNP (and Green and SSP) membership. SNP membership has increased by over 40,000 to over 70,000 members making them the third largest UK political party on only 8% of the UK population. Approximately 1 in every 60 Scottish voters is a member of the SNP. They have more members than the Communist Party of China. (1) The Labour Party might have 10,000 members in Scotland.
So, the SNP are going to win 40 Westminster seats in 2015.
Well no.
As John Curtis points out things are not quite as dire as at the moment as the hullaballoo would have you believe. The Labour Westminster vote is perhaps down a little, perhaps a little softer than it was but it’s still there and still functionally the same as it was in 2010.
True many Labour voters voted for independence. I think those that did voted for independence in the hope that it would short circuit their side having to win the 2015 and 2020 general elections. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they see independence as a permanent panacea. What is the next decision then need to make. The 2015 general election will probably be framed as a fight between Labour and Conservatives over who can manage the deficit least badly.
http://blog.whatscotlandthinks.org/2014/10/labour-worried/
The 70,000 SNP members might make a bit of a difference but the ability of a ground campaign to overturn the effects of the strategic situation of an election and the air campaign are limited.
There is also what I call the First Past the Post inflection point or the Only A Bar Chart Can Win Here principle. First Past the Post elections are about getting more votes for your broad coalition than the other broad coalition gets and concentrating them behind one candidate. A large factor in this is trying to narrow down your choices to who you think is okay who can win and who you hate who might win. At the moment it looks like most people who would vote centre-left will still think the only people who can win the seat they live in over the Tories are Labour. This is backed up by a few remarks from Curtis. There are no seats where the SNP are within 10% of the Labour vote. There not many where they are within 20%. There are not many seats where an easily achievable switch from Labour to SNP puts the SNP through.
Whilst a lot of one-time Labour voters voted Yes, perhaps more than a third about one in five SNP voters voted No. Voters in Scotland already happily split their vote between Labour at Westminster and the SNP at Holyrood. If you can ask what is the point of the Labour Party at Holyrood you can equally ask what the point of the SNP at Westminster is.
This isn’t to say that the No vote wasn’t bad news for Scottish Labour. It was. They badly ran a negative campaign. There is a video of their current leader basically agreeing that Scotland is too poor, too wee and too stupid to thrive as an independent country. They’ve irritated lots of voters. Alienated many of their activists. Demonstrated once again that they are basically the Glasgow wing of the Islington Labour Party. They’ve lost members to the SNP. They go in to the 2015 General Election in poor shape against an opposition that has been energised and enthused and angered by losing the referendum. With a close General Election result and constitutional issues in play the SNP will fancy holding the balance of power and have everything to play for.
What does winning mean? For the Labour Party is means getting more seats than the Tories at Westminster. For the SNP it means taking a few seats off Labour.
(With Salmond stepping down as First Minister, the SNP now have a spare heavy weight figure of their own to deploy against a vulnerable inner-city Labour seat. Just a thought.)
But I don’t think the General Election in 2015 will be a harpoon through the heart for the once mighty whale of Scottish Labour.
My main assumption is that we don’t see significant constitutional reform or electoral reform in the UK over the next 5 years i.e. that the Vow is trashed and that Labour and the Tories can’t work a suitable constitutional settlement in England that leaves both of them, but only them, in with a chance of running the government.
What I think is more likely to happen is this.
If the SNP are lucky rumours that Johann Lamont is about to be booted in favour of Jim Murphy will prove true. Imagine trying to run for First Minister of Scotland when you are not even the leader of Scottish Labour.
The SNP do well in Scotland in 2015. They pick up a few seats, maybe a dozen. If they end up holding the balance of power at Westminster then they get marginally more favourable funding and a marginally more favourable constitutional settlement from Westminster until the Tories scupper the whole thing by insisting on English Votes for English Laws which the London Labour Party will reject. A good result for the SNP would be to get within 10% in a lot of seats ready for the bar charts in 2020.
In 2016 the SNP win a third term under fresh leadership. In particular they will be chipping away at Labour’s constituency vote in Glasgow and Dundee. By then the Solemn Vow will have been exposed for the unworkable and undeliverable fantasy that it is and many of those who voted Labour and No to get Devo Max will have seen that their referendum vote was hornswoggled out of them. The SNP’s 2016 election campaign of only a vote for the SNP can guarantee Home Rule and that’s the only way to stop Labour and the Tories cutting our budgets.
Following the 2016 Holyrood election comes the real death knell for Scottish Labour the next round of local elections. Here’s where the SNP’s new Grand Army comes in to play with a hugely more effective Get Out The Vote campaign leading to many Labour councillors losing their seats. Electoral Reform Society research shows a strong link between local councillors in an area and wining and holding Westminster seats. With their local councillor diminished the Labour party infrastructure is now under significant pressure.
Come the 2020 UK general election the combination of the SNP having created lots more marginal seats in 2015 and having a massively better Scottish infrastructure and the loss of incumbency factors as Labour MP’s retire puts the SNP in with a chance of winning the 2020 General Election.
And that’s when Nicola Sturgeon stands a chance of harpooning the whale.
(1) Not quite, the Communist Party of China has 86.7m members out of a population of 1,351m, about one in every 16 of the population.
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However, a couple of views from inside the belly of the whale (I'm still a member). The self-harm that Labour inflicted on themselves by being seen to ally with the Tories cannot be minimised. For many Labour voters, that was a true Animal Farm moment. I can't see anyone on board at the moment who is going to change that perception. In a Westminster election it doesn't take Labour voters switching to the SNP to make a difference in the outcome, it just takes Labour voters not voting.
As with the referendum, the anti-Labour voters have a strong motivation to get out and vote. Labour supporters? Not so much. If you run the numbers on a General Election turnout of 30% going to 45%, and that additional 15% being anti-coalition (and here I mean the Lib/Lab/Tory coalition we've seen for the last couple of years in Scotland) then things become very interesting indeed.
When it comes to voting, though, I don't know where I'll go. Some of my friends are in that surge of new SNP members - not just from Labour, but from the LDs too. I can't see myself joining the SNP though, any more than I can see myself joining the Greens or the SSP. I also can't see myself staying part of the Labour party - this week's baying support for pursuing Poll-Tax non-payers has been the final straw for me.
I would put my name to a pro-Scotland party, though, or a coalition of such parties. That would require a new kind of politics in Scotland. One where the Yes vote identified as a single force at the GE. I don't think this is totally out of the question. Normally I'd say that it couldn't be done, but right now?
There's a feeling that just about anything is possible.
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I don't have the energy to rewrite.
But you make some really interesting points, and we'll see what happens! :)
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And now I'll never know what you thought!
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Not impossible but a big ask.
I’m also wondering what the SSP and the Greens bring that the SNP don’t already have. Which seats are they nearly winning that the SNP don’t have their eyes on.
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I think what a non-SNP party would bring to the party is not being the SNP. I'm not really a representative Labour voter, or party member come to that, and I don't bear the SNP any ill-will. But I'd still find it very difficult to vote for them.
Labour "Yes" voters voted for Independence not for, and indeed in spite of, the SNP. The difference is fairly fundamental, and will be made even clearer in Labour's campaign next year.
I can see, for instance, the Scottish Socialist Party being a more natural place for a Labour voter in Pollock or Provan to put their vote than for the nationalists.
In the same way, Green is an alternative for the LD voters of Bearsden and Bishopbriggs.
Of the Coalition of the Willing, I'd be most likely to go Green, but would feel it was a wasted vote under FTP. If there isn't a pre-election coalition, then I'd probably hold my nose and vote SNP.
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I still think you need a lot of people to switch to the SNP (or Yes Alliance) and a lot of people to stay at home.
I guess the killer will be if the activists and local councillors stay at home.
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I need some figures on it, but I know that most of the recruitment of new voters was done by the Yes parties.
As to the activists and the councillors? Well I'm an activist, and I won't be turning out for the party that wanted to pursue those who'd returned to the electoral roll for Poll Tax arrears from 25 years ago. And if the councillors who supported that show their faces in certain parts of Glasgow, they might end up with egg on their faces...
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I have a generation of distrust for the SNP, going back to when they voted down a Labour government and brought in Thatcher.
Now logic tells me that was 35 years ago, and that the SNP these days are a very different party.
But politics for me is at least as much about the gut as about the brain, and I need to believe in a party to be a member.
So some thinking to be done by me, yet.
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Or someone would have pushed Michael Foot under a bus.
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ooh.
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I'm very curious.
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(As the results were announced, Johann was prancing from studio to studio crowing over her victory. It was nauseating, and at that moment, she seemed to have lost the plot, and her role within it. She had completely failed.)
Following Jack O'Connell and Wendy Alexander, Labour have been on a downward trajectory, and by handing the responsibility for campaigning for the union to Westminster, they have proved themselves to be devoid of ideas, and frankly unwarranted of voters support.
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At Holyrood their vote share and MSP's returned doesn't appear to have moved much from 1999. They are a bit hamstrung, in my view, by not being large enough to be the main opposition party (although I'm not sure that's a formal concept at Holyrood) and also being very, very reluctant to enter a coaltion. Not being prepared to enter a government and therefore not presenting a credible threat of doing so rather limits their effectiveness. I mean there's definitly a role for some people who can string two sentences together to scrutinise the government's policies and actions but that's where the Scottish Tories start and finish at the moment.
Like Labour they are hampered by the same influence by London over policy and by the same draw to Westminster.
But, to be honest, that's all a bit by-the-by in an existential fight to the death between the SNP and the Labour Party.
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You mean, winning the majority of the Scottish seats? No party that runs only in Scotland can win the General Election, no matter how well it does.
That also tends to assume bottomless SNP talent pool. Even though dual seating is possible between Holyrood and Westminster, is it not?, the same factors that draw Labour talent towards the latter also, mutatis mutandis, draw SNP talent towards the former. SNP can form a government in Holyrood. It can't in Westminster.
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Particularly in 2020 which is far enough from 2014 that #IndyRef2 is a credible ask and close enough to 2014 that the spirit and infrastructure of the Yes 2014 campaign might still be around.
Good point on the SNP talent pool. However, They now seem to have the potential for much more depth with an additional 40,000 members to draw on and, in my view, the strategic momentum that makes young aspiring politicians more likely to join the SNP than any of the other leftish outfit in Scotland. If you want to win, join the team that's winnning.
Of all the parties the SNP have an easier time of double seating as, on principle, they don't vote on matters that don't affect Scotland. They therefore don't really have to master much of a brief. In a 2020 SNP win scenario they also won't be expecting their MP's to serve more than one term. SNP MP's are very unlikely to be involved in a UK government. So all they really need is some lobby donkeys who can do a decent job as a constituency MP.
So easier for the SNP to double seat and less damaging for them to send their B team to Westminster.
It's very unlikely that the SNP will ever be involved in a UK government but no impossible. Depending on how you read the polls there is a credible scenario where neither Labour or the Tories plus the Lib Dems hold a majority and are dependent on a third party for support. In that situation I personally doubt that the SNP would take part in the ministry and would prefer a confidence and supply and constitutional reform arrangement but it's not inconceivable that they would opt for a few junior ministerial posts in the Treasury, Defence, Foreign Office and Trade and Industry.
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Yeah, I could see, in theory, the SNP participating in a coalition Westminster government. That sort of thing - a regionalist party in the national government - is easier to comprehend on the continent, where they have a lot more understanding of how coalitions work. The closest I guess the UK has come to that was the 2010 scenario involving a Lab-LD coalition, which wouldn't have commanded a majority, so the question became of how any of the Ulsterians would get dragged in.
And, of course, the Irish Nationalists of yore provided oodles of outside support to the Liberals in Gladstone/Asquith days, demonstrating considerable patience in the process.
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In the current mood I think breeching that convention would be a bad thing. The UK government might as well just hand over the keys to Nicola Sturgeon.
(I’m assuming that the thrust of this question is about whether SNP MP’s would need to be competent enough to scrutinise legislation that affected devolved matters.)
I think over the next few election cycles we in the UK are going to become much more used to coalition governments.
How did the Irish Nationalists play it?
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I didn't say "measures devolved." I said "measures devolved."
Let's say that schools are devolved. Holyrood legislates on schools for Scotland, then, right? But Holyrood doesn't legislate on them FOR ENGLAND. Westminster does.
So my question is, have the SNP Westminster representatives customarily abstained on such measures?
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I thought I'd said upthread.
SNP MP's generally abstain on matters affecting other parts of the UK that are devolved to Holyrood when they affect Scotland.
In fact some of them got some flack a few years ago for not voting on a matter that looked like it only affected England but turned out to actually affect Scotland. Might have been something to do with energy asset planning permissions.
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Amazing how much that still makes me wince.